


Making Monsters

by MumblingSage



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Catholic Character, F/F, Gothic, Murder, Past Child Abuse, Plot Twists, Pre-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Surprise Ending, abusive families, background relationship with Thomas Sharpe, content warning: Lucille Sharpe, if I'm vague it's because I want to avoid spoilers, so much murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:18:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5038987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were other wives before. Even ones he loved.<br/>Ones she loved, too.<br/>Not that love could save them.</p><p>At the time, she hadn’t realized just how inseparable Thomas and Lucille Sharpe were. Taking one of them without the other felt as difficult and as wrong as prying a gem from its antique setting.<br/>Many of her realizations have come late. Late and unwelcome. A refrain that runs through her head. Unwelcome and late. She wonders if it describes herself. The late Lady Sharpe. She thought she had been welcome here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Monsters

She hears the music drifting upstairs, in turns rippling and rhythmic, always evocative of Lucille’s fingers caressing the ivory piano keys. The harmonies are simpler now. Sometimes she has Thomas join her, but it is too obvious that he lets himself be led, and he cannot always keep up.

They used to play duets, she and Lucille. Sitting side by side, hands moving in concert without needing to look at or consult each other. She’d shared her library of sheet music, and it seemed even the newest tunes were already familiar to Lucille, or else she was quick to learn them. In return she’d taught her older songs, English songs. In particular, there was a lullaby…she’s playing it now. Alone, because Lady Sharpe is unable to stir from her sickbed.

But afterwards, once silence falls and is stirred only by the creak of settling architecture and the hacking cough that twists her double in the sheets, footsteps climb the stairs and Lucille comes to visit.

She holds the cup to her lips so she can drink. She feeds her—porridge, broth, thin-sliced bread spread so thickly with butter that it greases her fingertips. She lets her patient suck her fingers clean.

Lucille combs her hair and helps her change gowns when she sweats through them. She can’t stand the odor of her own sickness and dabs perfume on her collar bone, grown more prominent, and wrists, grown thinner. Lucille leans close to sniff and tells her she smells lovely. There’s more scent in the oils she brings up to her, rich and medicinal. She rubs them into her dry skin and even over her scars.

She doesn’t want Lucille or anybody for that matter to touch her stomach, her tender and frequently upset belly, and so she won’t. But she does caress oil over her thighs, wasting and withering but still soft, and over her chest where the circling of slick fingers sometimes seems to relieve her breath, and over her back with its burden of stripes from her father’s strap.

She’d been so afraid at first to become Lady Sharpe, to join a new family. Family to her has not been safe, not been kind. Not been necessary, or so she thought. But there were no brutes here. Thomas’s hands and lips were as gentle as his manner. Lucille was something else, was _harder,_ but on the day of the wedding she had welcomed her into their family with a kiss surprising in its warmth.

At the time, she thought it was as well she got along with hersister-in-law, because Lucille came everywhere with them. They crossed France for their honeymoon and every night as she went to bed with her husband they had to pass her door. Thomas hadn’t seemed to mind. And soon she didn’t either. Lucille’s presence, bright and hard as a gemstone, was not unwelcome.

At the time, she hadn’t realized just how inseparable Thomas and Lucille Sharpe were. Taking one of them without the other felt as difficult and as wrong as prying a gem from its antique setting.

The only place she hasn’t had both of them at once was in bed.

As she lies there with the breath rattling in her lungs, she shies from the thought but is not sure why. She wonders if she regrets it. That would be a late realization to come to.

Many of her realizations have come late. Late and unwelcome. A refrain that runs through her head. _Unwelcome and late._ She wonders if it describes herself. _The late Lady Sharpe._ She thought she had been welcome here.

But the tea hadn’t always tasted so bitter.

#

She hears the house sinking and crumbling. Allerdale Hall groans like a soul in agony, or a woman in passion. Sometimes it causes panic to beat in her struggling chest. Remembering the day of the carriage accident, being eight years old and huddled against the seat listening to an injured horse, a vast and powerful creature helpless to do anything, not even able to reach the peace of death any faster. It needed her father’s bullet to rescue it, the only piece of mercy she can remember him ever showing.

Her father had been so unhappy afterwards. But even before he came back with his rifle, it had hurt to listen to the dying horse. A strong creature brought to submission by something even stronger. She’d been compassionate in those days.

“We get used to it,” Lucille had told her.

She’d more than gotten used to the Hall. She’d fallen in love with it. Even if it was coming apart, while it stood it was her home. She loved its intricate carvings and lofty windows, the nobility of the antique furniture and liveliness of the drafts and the vivid scarlet that stained the lower floors.

Lucille had laughed at her when she said so. Only upon reflection does she wonder if she’d made her sister-in-law uncomfortable. Even jealous of her home and her caring for it. She had pointed out the roof above them over the main stairway, and how it threatened to cave in any day now.

“Aren’t some things too dangerous to love?”

The light in her eyes was humor; even at the time she knew Lucille was mocking her.

“I love it,” she said again, almost defiantly. “I love your home. I’m so glad it’s mine to stay in.”

“You never want to leave?” Lucille threaded an arm through hers. She leaned close enough that she felt her inhaling.

“Never.”

And the house sighed in agreement, breathing fire from its hearths like a many-throated dragon.

#

Lucille brings her books. While she’s still in the room, she pages through them, twisting the pages to search for hidden pictures. They’d spent long evenings down in the library searching for them, triumphantly displaying their prizes and when—as they so often did—they proved obscene, laughing wildly.

“I don’t know,” Lucille said at last at one, her long mouth twisting in contradiction to her jaded words. “They get so…predictable.”

“Would you be more creative?” she asked. They were too far from the fireplace for it to be blamed for the heat touching her cheeks, beating in her throat.

She would be.

She hadn’t known her limbs could twist in such ways, or that when they did it would feel not undignified or strange but freeing, rapturous. The pressure of flesh against hers, the slide of skin over skin, the whisper of breath and gliding tongues. Coiling and uncoiling tension in her breast, in her heart, in her cunt. Hands gently yet firmly gripping her hair, her breasts, her thighs to part them. Openings and seizings and the slickness on her fingers afterwards, and the way they fought for the privilege of licking it away. Lucille tasted of a delicate musk, moth-soft and with an antique sweetness as of dust. She _was_ creative, more adventurous and unrestrained and eager than her brother.

She didn’t often talk about her husband with Lucille. It was a thing that ran too deep for words, that surpassed her understanding. She recognized that and left it be, no more ready to discuss such things than she would debate religion with a priest.

“It would not change how he feels about either of us,” was all Lucille said.

Perhaps it did not even count as adultery—not because she was a woman, of course (perhaps that would make it a different sin entirely, as would the onanism it sometimes seemed to approach, both physically and emotionally; but theology never would be her strong point). Rather because it strained nothing, trespassed on nothing, did not even seem like a deception. She didn’t think Thomas knew, but it didn’t matter that he didn’t. She and Lucille belonged together and he must intuit it. A bond as real as any marriage or any connection between siblings. Closer than many, though not perhaps closer than the unnamable link between the two Sharpes.

Lucille’s fingers stroked through a length of her hair, pulling it straight in a dark line over the curve of one breast. “Nothing comes between Thomas and me,” she whispered.

 _I do,_ she thought even then.

But she doesn’t. Not really. Thomas comes up once or twice a day to ask after her solicitously, to bend and kiss her forehead or her mouth with soft and gentle lips, and then he leaves her the rest of the time to Lucille’s ministrations. And when Lucille is not with her? Who knows?

Sometimes the piano delivers her their uneasy harmonies. The rest of the time, whatever the two of them are up to, she knows nothing of it. She cannot even guess.

#

Sometimes she hears machinery, the growl of great engines or quieter fly-buzz of a toy in a distant room. He plays, her husband. No matter how great his ambitions that is ultimately all they are, the playing of a clever child.

He’s using her money to do it. At first they’d all pretended it was an investment. Now she knows it was nothing so productive.

She can’t begrudge them. She has no special attachment to her fortune. It was handed down through generations and came most immediately from her father, and she could do without anything of his.

She’s learned how much she can do without.

She’s learned what she cannot forgive, and even more awfully, what she can. She comes to look forward to the warmth and bitterness of the tea and misses it when Lucille is late. She is not often late.

_Not late and not unwelcome, welcome and not late._

She anoints her with the perfume that she cannot do without and she touches her with gentleness that she needs, needs to know exists even if she no longer quite believes in it. For a long time she thought everything in the world was brutish and cruel. But now she knows there is more refinement in texture than that. Lucille Sharpe caresses her and feeds her poison with such gentle cruelty that it mends something in her broken heart.

#

Moths flutter against the windows. A cold wind rattles the panes in the casements, stirs billows of red-stained snow from the ground in plumes even she can see from this upper floor. It is late November and the moths are dying. She is beginning to believe that when spring comes she will not be there to see them again.

She remembers the journey north, and how the moths seemed to follow them, beating at the glass around the lanterns. They’d become paler the farther they drew into the empty fields and scattered houses and mines, away from the low gray smogs of cities and industry.

“Camouflage,” Thomas had said.

“The white ones stand out down there.” Lucille watched wings through the carriage windows. Lady Sharpe followed her gaze and watched them, too, but these moths moved too quickly for her to make out their shade. “They get eaten. Prey has to be invisible.”

“A principle of survival,” Thomas added softly.

“The fittest survive.” Lucille had gone on to say some things about natural selection, things that sat uneasily at the time in her consciousness. Her new sister-in-law almost sounded godless. And she herself was not godless, at least not at that time. Nominally she’d become Protestant for the sake of her marriage, a step towards heathenry according to her childhood faith, but she had not the principles for a true falling-out with religion. Even now, atheism would take too much certainty.

She still wears the cross on its thin silver chain around her neck. It had been a gift from one of the nuns at the orphanage. The nun was not gentle, was too stern to be kind, with expectations of reverence and obedience that it was hard for any creature of this world to meet. Yet it was a gift, proof that somewhere in the world people gave gifts to each other. Evidence of something more than brutality. So she kept it.

Lucille had noticed it the first time they were in bed together, since she never took it off. But she didn’t ask about it until months later.

By then they were so close that she had told Lucille everything. “They sent me to the orphanage after Papa died. I think they hoped I would grow into the religious life and offer myself—and the rest of the fortune I inherited—to the convent.”

“They didn’t know?” Lucille asked softly. She let go of the chain and traced the skin beneath it, long, steady strokes on her neck, above the threading pulse.

“They suspected nothing. I appeared a very dull child.”

“I would have liked a convent, I think.” Lucille moistened her lips. “Much better than the place I went.”

Her hand moved lower. She stretched out beneath it. “It was your mother?” Of course she’d been introduced to the portrait. The old witch’s ring was not on her finger; she took it off every time Lucille came to her. Once she’d seen Lucille sneak it onto her own hand, when she seemed to think she wasn’t looking.

“We had to stop her.”

She nodded. She understood completely. How fitting, that they had this in common. “What happened?”

“He stood up to her.” Lucille swallowed hard but did not look away from her. “I had to protect him.”

Another nod. It was dangerous, standing up. It was stupid. Cleverer children should know better. Thomas had not been as clever as she thought him. And maybe she too was a dull child after all. Years of terror had ground her almost down to nothing, but a spark had remained, and that spark had been reckless.

“And you?” Lucille seemed to follow her thoughts.

“I heard a story about a girl at one of the farms running off. She’d wanted to marry a young man that the family wanted nothing to do with. I was only nine years old, far too young to marry, and anyway there was no one I cared to—at the time.” They both chuckled, laughter so low it sounded hushed, almost reverent. “But I knew then that I wanted to run away. I knew then it was possible. And so I did.”

Her shoulders curved as if against a chill. Lucille’s arms came around them, and her palm stroked the scars from the strap without flinching.

“One of the grooms found me not seven miles down the road. I was dragged back and Papa was in a rage and I knew—he was always in a rage, but I knew this wouldn’t pass. He’d seen how badly I wanted to get free of him. And he would never forgive it. He had them take away my books.”

Lucille held her as her entire body shuddered, a memory of pain that was other than physical.

“But there were some I had hidden under a floorboard beneath the bed. Books my governess would have taken away. Stories, mostly—and such lurid ones—but I learned things from them. I was too desperate to think that they were fiction, that they couldn’t happen in real life. So I made them happen. One of the books had far too much detail about a certain substance I knew Papa kept in his medicine chests… And once he grew bored of me everyone ignored me again, so I was able to pinch a little. A very little pinch at a time. And then, pinch by pinch….”

She was miming it, picking at the coverlet between them. Lucille didn’t grasp her hand, make it go still, try to soothe her. For that she was more grateful than for any gentleness.

“You poisoned him,” she said. The pride in her voice rang like a clarion, almost erotically rich.

“I did.”

What she had heard in Lucille’s voice made her want to embrace her. So she did.

In the midst of kisses, curiosity bit. Nothing was forbidden her when they were like this, so she asked, “And what did you do?”

Lucille went still. She drew back enough for her to see her face. Its lines were drawn thin. They seemed set in an old and permanent pattern, like the facets of a gemstone. Some of her color had drained, but as her hand stroked lower it returned.

She said, “Sometimes poison isn’t fast enough.”

These were not confessions as much as love notes. Sharing the deepest hidden parts of themselves. They had no need to hide any longer.

Taking on the secrets and the guilt as eagerly as she received Lucille’s kisses and joined her embrace, she emerged from these talks feeling proud and polluted.  As if she had committed two murders rather than one. So greedy for Lucille that she would devour even her sins.

As she swallowed her poison.

The sickness had started soon after—shortness of breath, blood that ran too hot or too cold, limbs that no longer held her up or did her bidding. She noticed the new bitterness in her food and at first she thought that was only a symptom, too. But she was not dull-witted. And she knew Lucille too well.

She feels death penetrate. She swallows it, her flesh absorbs it, each beat of her heart pushes death through her veins. Never before had she considered the intimacy of poison. When she killed her father it had quickly become a matter of routine—pinch by measured pinch. It had seemed clean, happening at a distance.

But there isn’t really any such thing as murder at a distance. Not for the victim. For her it is immediate, thrilling and terrifying in equal measure, overpowering as passion but sometimes unexpectedly merciful. Quickly she learned to husband her strength but was sometimes surprised by a windfall of it. She had better days and didn’t know what to do with them. She had worse days and never could grow used to them. It is frustrating to die by inches, growing weaker and more helpless. Her body is no longer under her control—she can’t breathe as deeply as she wants to, can’t walk as fast or as far. She shivers and sweats at the same time. What happens in her belly she cannot contemplate. Her mouth tastes metallic or bitter or bloody, and she stinks. The stink was the only part she fully hates. The rest of it can always be somehow bearable. A fever flush like the bloodrush of lust. The sweet relief as it breaks. The coolness of her pillow when she turns it over, or when Lucille turns it if she doesn’t have the strength. The warmth of another body sliding under the covers beside hers. Once, sweetness, candied fruit pressed to her lips by slender fingers. She is sure they are Lucille’s, but when she thanks her Lucille seems to know nothing of it. So that bit of mercy was Thomas’s, which oddly disappoints her. On her more desperate days, though, she clings to the memory of kindness.

She clings to whoever joins her in her bed. They don’t seem to find her repulsive, even as she draws closer and closer to decay. In all her life she has never been considered ugly, and she is relieved that she will not have to face that yet.

Never before had she imagined what it might be like to drink poison from the hand of someone she loved. To feel it working its way through her. Invading every part of her. This body is no longer fully hers. Lucille’s death swims in her veins, working her will, making it incarnate.

She feels it drawing to a consummation.

This is seduction as much as murder.

On her last good day (even as it happens some part of her suspects it is the last) she struggles to her feet and tries to dress. She draws on a corset over her bare breasts and begins to lace it, loosely. No time to bother with a camisole—she tore off the one she woke in, its cream lace caked white with dried salt, its underarms wet, the collar stained with a smear of red. Her bare skin is pale but shimmers, kissed with a sheen of sweat from the exertion of standing and stepping into the petticoat. Her fingers begin to tremble as she tries to tie a lace.

Hands at her waist, supporting her. Undoing the knots she has fought so hard to make, freeing her body. She doesn’t know how necessary this freedom is until she takes her first unbound breath in a quarter of an hour and it is like a gust of cold wind to her lungs.

It comes out in a storm of coughing, flecked with blood.

Lucille supports her through it, dabs her handkerchief to her lips to clean them. She peels the corset away from her waist and lifts it up. Her fingertips skim her breasts, but it is a nurse’s touch more than a lover’s. Yet there is tenderness in it. Enough to make her dare—she draws courage from Lucille’s gentleness and the knowledge that she will have no better day after this.

After sinking on the bed, she grasps Lucille’s wrist and demands, “Why are you killing me when you love me?”

She isn’t sure Lucille will answer. Maybe she will dismiss it as a fever dream or pretend not to hear. Yesterday, which was a bad day, she had tried to ask Thomas during his brief visit. The words could not come out loud enough for him not to ignore. Still, she can forgive Thomas. He is only letting her die. Lucille is the one who brews the poison. 

“Why?”

She may be able to forgive Lucille, too, if only she can understand.

“I haven’t hurt you.” The words come out tear-sticky, which she hasn’t intended and doesn’t want, but it does sting, the thought that Lucille might consider her a danger that must be removed. As bad as the Sharpes’ mother or her own father. “Why do you want to kill me?”

And again, the part that cuts deepest, “You love me.”

“I do.” Lucille sits beside her, stroking back her hair. “I do, I do.”

Her arms wrap around her and pull her close, bare breasts pressed to silk and rigid whalebone underneath. Lucille’s gowns are always so old-fashioned, she thinks incongruously. Wanting to think of anything but what she has to. The truth she has fought to hear and now must listen to.

“I love you, but love isn’t enough. There are things that run deeper.” Lucille’s hands stroke her back, stroke sweat-matted hair and scars. “And if love should threaten them, then it must be gotten rid of.”

It is true, she sees with the clarity of the dying, a clarity second only to that of a murderer. Beneath love there lie monsters. If they should stir to the surface, there is no hope and no salvation from them. Her love threatens Lucille’s very life, the sanctity of her house and family (ah, but her money does not, her money is part of the reason, too; if she were any other woman perhaps her money would be sufficient reason for her death). Certainly it cannot save her. Her love for Thomas is simply dangerous, but her love for Lucille is vicious to both of them. So vicious that it is almost a monster itself. A flounder against the leviathan of Crimson Peak and all it stands for, of course, but still…she takes a certain pride in being part of a monster.

Her decline after that is certain yet slow.

#

Whatever her mother’s evil, Lucille would never have thought of running away from home. Murder was always her only option.

She thinks she is different; that she might not have become a murderer, if only she’d had the chance to escape.

But she will never run from Crimson Peak either. Even if she would, she cannot. There will be no more running for her ever again. She will never leave this place.

That much needs no forgiveness. She accepts it gladly. She takes whatever Lucille gives to her.

Sometimes the poison is in the tea, sometimes in the broth or porridge or baked in the bread or sprinkled in a thin coating she can hardly taste amidst the salt and cream of the butter. It may just be a fever dream but once she is absorbed in the impression of licking Lucille’s skin, kissing her and worshipping her body, only to find the familiar bitterness there, too.

She hears the machines working, producing nothing, absorbing bit by bit her fortune. She lets them take that, too.

She bends her head back and lets Lucille cut her hair, then watches as she braids it. Lucille is adept at this, and she wonders now why she never let her braid her hair in life (already this is how she thinks). When she ties off the coil, she brings it to her lips. Tears are in her eyes, just enough to add a gemlike brightness without falling. Then she secures it into a box.

The current Lady Sharpe catches a glimpse of at least two other such braids, mounted on pins like butterflies.

She is too weary and too close to the end for her world to be broken any more. Her heart is already broken. All the same, it is a revelation.

She doesn’t let Lucille know what she has seen. She doesn’t ask the questions brimming on her lips—so much is already obvious, and the rest does not matter. How can it matter how many women they’ve done it to before, when she is the one it’s happening to now?

Yet if she was the first, the only—a single and select victim—the scapegoat whose sacrifice would save them—their sole savior, however  unwilling—that she could have received with so much more gladness.

She raises her hand and holds it out to Lucille. Her sister, her lover, could easily step away. Could pretend not to see. But she doesn’t.

Her hand is the warmer of the two now, her clasp sure and firm.

“Please,” she says. “Please love me. One last time. Please, Lucille.”

She’s pleading, and she has never been one to plead. But if this works, it will never happen again.

“Please.” She could add, _I’m afraid,_ but she isn’t, not really. A sort of excitement stirs, sweet in her veins as the poison, hot beneath her skin as the fever. She will not lie and appear even more abject than she is. Pride remains. Yet she’s not too proud to disabuse Lucille of whatever notions she might have. If she thinks she sees fear in her eyes, and it kindles an answering light in hers—a weird light, desire as much as pity—she is not too proud to accept it.

“Please.”

And then she is not alone in the bed. She casts off the covers, making room for her. Undressing herself is easy, just the matter of slipping a nightgown over her head. Lucille wears more.

Even before the buttons at the front of her gown come apart, her head is bent there, nuzzling. Lucille’s lips brush the curve of her ear; the teeth catch the lobe and gently nibble.

At one point she shakes loose, reaches to the night table. There beside the box that holds her braid along with the hair of at least two other women she finds her perfumes. She refreshes the scent at her wrists and throat.

Then, as Lucille’s arm wraps around her waist, a tremor passes over her body. She drops the perfume bottle. It shatters on the floor, and what does not rise in a cloud of cloying odor to meet them sinks instead into the pitted, ancient boards. The glass has broken into splinters too tiny to use for anything. Lucille is kissing her nape. She lets her draw her back.

She even whispers, “Please.”

Her body is spread out on the bed and the weight of Lucille’s settles above it. She smells the healthy scent of the woman, clean sweat and lusty musk. Her body is just warm enough, cool against her fever and hot against the chill.

She is strong where she is weak. Steady where she trembles. And beautiful in a way she should not be. Whole and hard and unbreakable as a gemstone. What is beautiful ought to be fragile.

And what is delicate ought to be broken.

“Please…do this first…”

Lucille is not fragile. She moves over her steady and sure. Fingers lace through fingers. Tongues touch each other, timid and then fiercer. Lucille’s leg rises between her thighs, gives her something to ride on. It is all she can do, driving towards orgasm with motions that are awkward and frustratingly slow. It is easier to let Lucille do the work. To stroke with her hands and to rut against her. To kiss, to bite, to swallow.

 _The devoured,_ she knows, _will live on in the devourer._

She kisses her back.

 _Unwelcome and late._ The old refrain beats in her head in rhythm to the roll of her hips.

But this is welcome. It is not too late.

Lucille bends her head and sucks at her breasts, nursing until the nipples ache. All the sweetness in the sensation seems to pool between her legs. Her clit is swollen and touched by nothing but air, seemingly licked by the drafts that stir through this room. She is no longer sure she is breathing unless she does it by a conscious effort. But it takes no awareness to find Lucille’s thigh and rub against it, to seek and find the friction she so badly needs.

Her head is spinning like it has never spun before. It might be hanging off the bed. She could be floating in water or on clouds. What matters is that Lucille’s body touches hers—mouth to breasts, legs curved and intertwined, hands in constant motion. From this she can build a universe.

She knows its laws. The fittest survive.

The fittest are not always strongest.

The beautiful are not always fragile, but the fragile are not always broken.

She tastes Lucille and thinks of the moths. Sometimes the survivors are those best disguised. But there is nowhere to hide here. She is known.

To survive, we must transform.

Lucille wears herself out trying to return the dying to life. But she is successful. Climax embraces her with rare gentleness, rising up through every part of her, from tender belly to liquid limbs. Her breaths come like sobs, but they are no longer desperate. The time for desperation has passed.

Lucille collapses on the pillow beside her, sticky and exhausted.

The latest Lady Sharpe gathers the last of her strength.

She turns and kisses her sister, her lover on her cheek.

She reaches for the bloodstained pillow beneath her own head. She draws it up. In one motion—not smooth, but so rapid that it doesn’t matter—she sets it over Lucille’s face, and then she throws all her weight atop it, and spends all her strength in keeping it there.

She is a poisoner at heart, but sometimes poison is too slow.

This proves intimate enough.

Lucille bucks beneath her, arms flailing, striking and scratching. She bears scars from instruments far crueler than fingernails. The streaks of pain meld with the whole-body mellow fullness that lingers in the aftermath of her orgasm. Weak as she may be, Lucille is exhausted from their lovemaking and taken by surprise. And she holds nothing back. If she survives, she may regain her strength. But it’s not going to stop until she kills Lucille or Lucille kills her.

With the sight of those three braids in a row in the box, death has become unacceptable.

 _You loved me,_ she thinks but doesn’t say. She doesn’t have the breath to spare for speech. _You loved me and you murdered me. You loved me and still I was unwelcome, because something was between us. I came into your life too late. Unwelcome and late…_

She will forgive Lucille, afterwards.

But first she has to die.

She doesn’t let up even as the cross is ripped from her neck. She doesn’t let up after Lucille goes still, in case it is a feint. She doesn’t let up until her arms burn from the pressure put on them. And even then it isn’t the discomfort that makes her stop, it’s not even the pain. It’s the sound of the door opening behind her.

She sits up and takes the pillow from Lucille’s face. The image there is not pretty but it is final.

She folds the cross into a limp hand and decides then that she will bury it with her. It is not until later that she decides where that burial will be, but already she suspects that Lucille will never leave these walls.

There are no tears in her eyes—she is tired beyond tears.

Thomas sits on the bed before her, or else he collapses onto it. He won’t look squarely at the figure lying there. Nor will he meet her gaze until she grasps his chin and forces his head up, making him.

“Kiss me again,” she says, and she offers her mouth, tipping it so that his cool and uncertain lips find hers just beneath the scar that cuts them. A souvenir of her father, the brute. One of the few identifying features, she realizes now, that set her off from his sister. The hair braided in the box is the same color as the dead woman’s.

It suggests a number of possibilities that fail to rattle her. She knows the innocence of his touch, though, and she knows that she is the only woman he has ever fucked.

He kisses her as he had just an hour ago, what had been meant as a goodbye kiss. Oh, he’s always tried to be kinder. But she wonders if he ever visited the other wives as solicitously. If this, like the fucking, had been a sign of his special care or if it was only a routine.

She parts her lips and catches his with her teeth. But she keeps anger on a leash. He didn’t try to save her, and she resents that, but in victory she thinks she can afford some small mercies.

And she doesn’t want to be a brute.

“I love you,” she says when the kiss breaks, and watches him tremble under her gentle cruelty. “Brother.”

He isn’t going to stand up to her. Long ago he learned that bad things happen when you stand up, when you resist. Since then he has become so pliable he can promise to honor and protect multiple women, then stand by and let them die because his sister required it. That is exactly how much marriage vows mean to him, and she takes precise note of that. She knows he won’t run away, either. None of them can.

And it’s true. She does love him.

A sister may mean more to him than a wife—then so be it. Survivors must transform. Either way, she is the woman he loves most in the world.

She is the mother of his child.

She takes his hand and presses it to her belly, swollen and twisting now as the child inside kicks. So it is alive after all. She fears the effect of the poison and knows it is too much to hope that it will be born healthy. It’s a shame, but she also suspects it was her pregnancy that prompted Lucille to begin killing her.

“You’re not my sister,” he protests at last. A token resistance. She is glad he makes it, because they have to establish the facts at once.

She sets her hand over his and leans close. So weak she almost swoons in his arms. Later she will, if she has to; she trusts him enough for that. She has a sense of the extent of her powers, now.

She has the strength to look him in the eyes and whisper, “Oh, but I am.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story was prompted first by my general feelings about Gothic narratives and tropes, especially around women, feelings strong enough to form their own center of gravity. Second by a mighty need for Lucille Sharpe femslash. And then most immediately, I was struck by Edith's line to Lucille as soon as she discovers The Secret, insisting "You aren't really his sister!" Pure denial, of course. But I was curious how that might work.
> 
> The answer is, not in a way that's much less fucked-up.
> 
> A shout-out is in order to Morethanonepage for educating me about moth evolution and Lucille Sharpe as a gemstone, but she is innocent of all else. Mea maxima culpa (especially the Roman Catholicism). Except for what's canon, which is of course not mine.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
